“After four decades of Israeli occupation, the infrastructure and superstructure of apartheid have been put in place. Outside the never-never land of mainstream American Jewry and U.S. media, this reality is barely disputed.” – American academic Norman Finkelstein.
In 2007 the courageous Israeli journalist Gideon Levy travelled to South Africa to attend a UN peace conference, during the visit Levy, who writes for the Haaretz newspaper, met the country’s Jewish intelligence services minister, Ronnie Kasrils. Kasrils, who had personally visited the Occupied Territories, spoke of his dismay at what he saw as a grim history revisited: “When we saw on television the drama going on in your country, the oppressive pictures of the methods you use toward the Palestinians, the uprooting of trees, the tanks entering Jenin, and the old woman weeping over the demolition of her house and crying ‘The Jews, the Jews’ – it’s just like what my grandmother used to tell me about the pogroms: The Cossacks are coming, the Cossacks are coming. I’m trying to say: It’s not the Jews, it’s Zionism that’s doing this. So I decided to get up and say something. I found this in the Jewish tradition: to open your mouth, in the name of conscience.” Kasrils rightly recognised that the evils of Apartheid had not died out with the redemption of his own country, they were alive and flourishing in a nation he thought of as the Jewish spiritual home.
In 2002 another veteran anti-Apartheid campaigner voiced his distress after a visit to the Holy Land. In a speech at a US conference called Ending the Oppression, Archbishop Desmond Tutu informed delegates that what he had seen was Apartheid, nothing less. “It reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa,” he informed his audiance. “The humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about”. He continued: “Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions?” The question eight years later may be considered rhetorical. Since Tutu visited the West Bank, Israel has undergone a dramatic and fundamental shift to the extreme right, allowing previous racist pariahs such as Avigdor Lieberman to crawl from under their rocks, slithering into the mainstream to occupy positions of high office; foreign minister in Leiberman’s case.
If you have never heard of him, a fellow rightist Zionist, Martin Peretz editor-in-chief of The New Republic, called Leiberman “a neo-fascist”, “a certified gangster” and “the Israeli equivalent of Jörg Haider”. Ophir Pines-Paz, the minister for science, culture and sport resigned when Leiberman’s party, Yisrael Beiteinu, was included by Olmert in his coalition government. Annoucing his resignation Pines-Paz declared: “The moment the government decided to allow the inclusion of Lieberman and his party, whose leaders are infected with racist and anti-democratic statements, I am left with no other choice.” Since then the grip of the extreme right on the Israeli political system has strengthened and Avigdor Lieberman is now surrounded by colleagues who seem determined to out-bid him in the political sewer race as they continually seek ways to strip Israel’s Arabs of their citizenship. ............. MORE:  http://ramallahonline.com/?p=4572 ............. Israel’s crimes in Gaza and Lebanon are well known, equally well known, although clouded in a smokescreen of a massive IDF disinformation campaign, is the crushing of the Freedom Flotilla’s attempt to break the inhuman blockade of Gaza. Not only has Israel embraced extremism internally, it has also thrown off even the faint traces of restraint that governed its external behaviour. Israel now is a rogue state, protected from repercussions by the US and thus emboldened to further extremism. Well, repercussions are required, and if the US will not allow the international community to impose these through the UN (whose resolutions Israel flouts with impunity), then the international community must seek other ways to reign in Israel, and by doing so aid the forces of Jewish liberalism that oppose the extremism of Zionism. A sporting boycott of Israel is long overdue, a start can be made by removing Israel from both European national and club competitions. It will not in itself bring about change, but as we witnessed with Apartheid South Africa, it will certainly play its part. (The article was first published at ETimes.com)  http://ramallahonline.com/?p=4572

Picture: Israel’s New Humanitarianism ..........  http://ramallahonline.com/?p=4281